Tag Archives: Charlottesville

Friend and Foe Drop the Hammer on Ilhan Omar

Posted on by

Well, it appears the Democrats have dropped a five-ton “Zero Tolerance” hammer on my newbie congresswoman. That’s gotta hurt.

The reaction to Ilhan Omar’s tweets about Jewish money in American politics could not have been more swift and indignant or filled with any higher level of dudgeon. Another breath was not going to be taken without hearing her unequivocal apology … which she kinda offered.

Within hours of her glibly tossing out a reference to an old P Diddy song she (and all Democrats by association) were being condemned for “hating Israel”.  Minutes later she was being taken out behind the barn for a whoopin’ by Nancy Pelosi and every Democrat close to a microphone. Yikes. Bad day, madam.

To be clear, the dagger’s edge of the condemnation of Mar wasn’t directed at her complaint about money in politics so much as it was … the inference of the “trope” she banged out via Twitter. To everyone that mattered, any reference to the way AIPAC (the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) doles out cash in Congress is exactly the same thing as saying “Jewish bankers control the world.”

I’ve said “yikes” already, right?

Several things come to mind.

1: Public officials in general would be very well-advised to reserve Twitter for only the blandest pronouncements. For example: “Today is Mothers Day. Let’s all tell Mom we love her.” On Twitter (which, “When it isn’t kindergarten it’s a sewer”*) anything else leads to instantaneous re-re-interpretation, flame wars and grief. Stop trying to prove you’re more clever in 20 words and an emoji than everyone else and stick to a speech or policy paper when you’ve got something important to say.

2: A nuanced conversation about Israel is damned rare in the USA. The reasons include the often psychotic tribalism of both the genocidal dictators over there in the ‘hood, (Saddam, Bashir al-Asad) and our oil-rich Gulf allies. (That sound you hear is the bone saw carving up the reporters our gas station buddies don’t like.) That and the perilous position Israel is always in relative to those neighbors. That reality has a way of severely out-weighing the innumerable ways Israel makes its situation worse by being controlled by its arch-conservative religious “leadership”. Given that pretty medieval crowd, there’s not much chance puppet governments like Benjamin Netenyahu’s will ever stop piling more and more people into West Bank developments and rubbing Israel’s affluence in the face of the average Palestinian, penned in and governed by their own rotating cast of demagogues. (And forget about ever sorting out which is the chicken and which is the egg.)

3: Omar is part of the current Congress’s 0.6% Muslim representation, (1% of total US population.) By contrast, Congress today includes 31% Catholics, 14% Baptists and 6% Jews. 3% of 535 declared either “don’t know” or “refused”, so they might be our atheist representation. Praise be!) Point being, Omar’s in no position to do anything other than register an occasional (albeit much too glib) complaint about the US government’s near-total deference to Israel … and the wealthiest of the Middle East’s Muslims. (But hey … when that Palestinian rabble strikes oil, we’ll take their calls.) Omar’s a voice in the wilderness, and yet she’s getting hammered by friend and foe alike as though she’s winding up to lead a jihad. Proportionality isn’t much in vogue these days.

4: It goes without saying that virtually every Republican in Congress and the pundit-ocracy is a hypocritical fool when it comes to condemning “hate speech.” Somewhere, a few of them might have expressed discomfort with Trump referring to the cro-magnon, tiki-torch, in-your-face-anti-Semitic Nazi-bros in Charlottesville as some of the “good people on both sides”, I just don’t recall at this moment. But it’s unfortunate even a few Democrats don’t use this fleeting window in the news cycle to reinforce Omar’s underlying complaint about money — from wherever — steering US politics.

Unfortunately, Zero Tolerance within the herd means everyone stays on the same script in these moments of (Twitter-sparked) crisis.

So much then for making lemonade out of this outrage.

(*Me. Often.)

Nazis? I Don’t See Any Nazis.

Posted on by

So 72 years after The Greatest Generation defeated the racist, totalitarian regimes of Germany and Japan we’ve elected a President of the United States who doesn’t dare criticize … Nazis.

We understand why of course. It’s because, as Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke reminded everyone over the weekend, after the neo-Nazi rally/murder in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“We are determined to take our country back,” said Duke. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.” He later added, “I would recommend you [Trump] take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists.”

At this point in the Trumpocalypse I hold little hope that refusing to call Nazis “Nazis” and hiding behind a bland White House statement condemning violence will be the turning point civilized people have been waiting for. High profile Republicans like Ted Cruz and Marc Rubio have issued strong … words … saying more or less what Trump can’t bring himself to say. But what they ever actually do about legislating away the roots of racism is a whole other thing. Because they too have Trump’s base problem. Trump’s people are also their people. They don’t stay in office without the 10%-12% red-faced racist vote.

But the thing that jumped out at me watching tape of the Charlottesville rally was the brazenness and bravado of the mostly young-ish men hanging their faces for all the world to see as they chanted Nazi slogans against blacks, Jews and “faggots.” The blow back in the age of social media has been immediate and often hilarious.

Without discounting sheer stupidity, it’s always worth asking why these characters feel emboldened to make such an unashamed public display of their rancid bigotry.

Obviously stupidity and bigotry are hard-wired into human nature. There’ll always be a percentage of the crowd maniacally proud of their animosities. But the point here is that Donald Trump didn’t create this class of raging fools. It’s actually the reverse. This virulent, ermboldened form of racism created Trump.  All he did was step up and exploit a principal facet of the late 20th/early 21st century Republican/conservative message.

I’ve been accused of having an obsession with the influence of commercial talk radio, which exploded in popularity in the late ’80s when the Reagan administration repealed The Fairness Doctrine, a broadcast rule requiring equal time rebuttal to charges and claims made against candidates and organizations. The modern “fake news” phenomenon began at this point, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh and literally hundreds of wanna-bes across the country unleashed to preach, without any serious counter argument anything their audience wanted to hear, facts and reality be damned.

Having spent (too much) time covering and being a host in that milieu, I can tell you first hand that at every point the ratings took a slide the answer from corporate executives and their local managers was to … get louder and crazier, or “go harder right,” as my one time boss told us. (For the record I was the token liberal, there to be ritually flogged, supposedly.)

The response from this group of shirt-and-tie businessmen to me asking why the hell they were selling complete nut job ideas like evolution-denial and cults of “Democrat generals” screwing up Dick Cheney’s Iraq war plan was, you guessed it, “Settle down. It’s just business.” “We’re just trying to sell ads, man.” As though stoking and encouraging the delusions and grievances of emotionally immature listeners was no different from talking more Vikings or playing more Taylor Swift.

When you look at the raging faces of the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville it’s worth considering how much of that crowd’s sense that they are the rising tide, the great, brave upswelling of true conservatism is based on the 30 years of indoctrination they’ve received from friendly neighbors of yours and mine “just doing my job, man”.

Responsibility for Charlottesville spreads a lot further than The Daily Stormer, which as I see as of a couple of hours ago has been hacked and taken over by Anonymous.

Count on it: Today on Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin: “The Radical Leftists’ War on The Daily Stormer’s First Amendment Rights.”